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It was kitchen-sink day at the Senate Judiciary Committee, and from the beginning Democrats seemed intent on demonstrating that they were going big. And if that meant some theater was necessary, so be it.

The third day of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings had barely begun when Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) declared that he was committing an act of “civil disobedience” by releasing documents that had been deemed “committee confidential” and, therefore, not available to the public.

The outspoken senator called it his “I am Spartacus” moment. But it quickly became clear, it was not.

adidas Gymnastics Prophere Black Shoes W Women’s Booker was quickly joined by Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) and backed by several of his Democratic colleagues who have spent days railing against the GOP majority’s refusal to disclose more of Kavanaugh’s records, particularly from his time as a lawyer in the Bush White House. The goal from the beginning was to tarnish Kavanaugh’s credibility and, later on, set traps.

“I openly invite and accept the consequences of my team releasing that email right now,” Booker said in reference to a confidential document, adding that those consequences could include “potential ousting from the Senate.”

The senator later said he does not believe his action would constitute a violation of the Senate’s rules, but Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) read a rule that states Booker could “suffer expulsion from the body.”

Booker swiftly responded: “Bring it on.”

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It takes two-thirds of the Senate for a member to be expelled, so it was highly unlikely that Booker would suffer that fate. The senator is widely viewed as a potential 2020 Democratic presidential contender, and Republicans quickly countered that Booker was simply trying to grab the spotlight in a made-for-TV moment.

“Running for president is no excuse for violating the rules of the Senate or of confidentiality of the documents that we are privy to,” Cornyn said. “This is no different from the senator deciding to release classified information that is deemed classified by the executive branch because you happen to disagree with the classification decision.”

But in a twist, the Republican side of the committee later disputed the idea that Booker was committing an act of “civil disobedience.” A spokesman for Cornyn said the documents were already cleared for public release at 4:00 a.m., and “the senators were notified of this” ahead of time. Moreover, Bill Burck, a lawyer for George W. Bush who handles presidential records, said “we had already told [Booker] he could use the documents publicly.”

(Cornyn acknowledged in a tweet Thursday afternoon that he was unaware of that change when he challenged Booker.)

Booker dodged questions of whether he knew about the public release when he spoke Thursday morning, and instead pointed out that he did, in fact, break committee rules on Wednesday night when he read from one of the documents.

“[W]e are continuing to release committee confidential documents in violation of a sham rule,” he said, quickly walking away from reporters.

TheProm with Neck V White Gown Sashes Brides Wedding Party Evening Green Lace Backless for WCwAwx5Xq8 Booker released on Thursday include emails in which Kavanaugh discusses “racial profiling.” In one of the emails dated just a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Kavanaugh writes that he “generally” favors “race-neutral” security measures. But he added that there is an “interim question of what to do before a truly effective and comprehensive race-neutral system is developed and implemented.”

Prophere adidas Black W Shoes Gymnastics Women’s The dispute over documents underscored the unconventional—and indeed unprecedented—nature of Democrats’ attempts to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination. Republicans control all levers of power on Capitol Hill, giving Democrats few tools to push back substantively—and especially on the substance of documents released just a few hours before a hearing.

“There’s a lot of back and forth about what’s the process, what’s it mean, what’s the current status,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) told reporters. “As an active member of the judiciary committee who felt that, to be well-prepared to question Judge Kavanaugh today, I needed to have clarity about what documents I was getting access to, what I could do or not do with those documents, before midnight last night.”

Hirono’s office also released an email Kavanaugh wrote in 2002 in which he says government programs intended for native Hawaiians “as a group is subject to scrutiny and of questionable validity under the Constitution.” A spokesman for Hirono told The Daily Beast that the senator had never asked for that document to be released publicly, and was not aware that it was already cleared to be published.

Those weren’t the only emails discussed during Thursday’s hearing.

As the proceedings were underway, The New York Times reported that Kavanaugh, when he served as a lawyer in the Bush White House, disputed the idea that Roe v. Wade is settled law.

In the email, Kavanaugh wrote: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

Asked to address the email on Thursday morning, Kavanaugh explained to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that he was simply clarifying that not “all legal scholars” believed it was settled law since “Justice [William] Rehnquist and Justice [Antonin] Scalia were still on the court at that time.”

“I thought it was overstating something about legal scholars and I’m always concerned with accuracy, and I thought that was not quite an accurate description of all legal scholars because it referred to all,” he said.

Kavanaugh then repeated that Roe v. Wade is an “important precedent” that had been “reaffirmed many times” since it was decided in 1973.

Not all of the documents discussed Thursday were leaked.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) took the more traditional route to get six emails he said showed Kavanaugh was not telling the truth about his role in the 2003 “memogate” scandal: he asked Grassley to release the documents.

By noon on Thursday, Leahy was circulating emails that he said showed Kavanaugh received materials that two Republican staffers had stolen from the server used by Democrats on the judiciary committee—a direct contradiction of claims Kavanaugh made in Senate testimonies in 2004 and 2006.

In addition to the emails salvos, Democrats continued to cryptically suggest that Kavanaugh was improperly discussing the special counsel’s investigation with White House officials or representatives of the law firm that represents President Donald Trump.

The line of questioning began Wednesday night when Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) asked whether Kavanaugh had conservations with anyone at the law firm Kasowitz Benson Torres, appearing to momentarily throw Kavanaugh off. But by Thursday, the firm released a statement saying none of its employees discussed the Robert Mueller investigation with Kavanaugh. And Kavanaugh himself was ready with an answer when Grassley asked him, point blank, if he has made any commitments to the White House on how he would decide on matters related to the investigation.

Either Wednesday’s explosive New York Times op-ed becomes the start of a bigger, public resistance to Trump from inside his own administration, senior officials who agree Donald Trump threatens the country tell The Daily Beast, or it will be nothing more than an exercise in moral vanity while America burns.

Some officials interviewed by The Daily Beast cheered the underlying message of the anonymously written op-ed. But several worried about its lasting impact, beyond provoking a familiar Washington parlor game: outing a dissenter. There was even a fear that the op-ed would hand Trump a pretext to purge his administration of the very bureaucratic scapegoats that the op-ed writer portrayed as being crucial to saving America from Trump.

“If there are senior people in leadership positions and these are their observations and feelings, then their efforts can’t just stop at the op-ed or move to mitigate the president here and there. They need to take steps that are more bold,” said a State Department official who was not cleared to talk to journalists. “Publicly resign, en masse.”

Without mass resignations, the official considered the op-ed little more than reputational insurance. “Folks have been looking to pay premiums on that policy for a while now. Anyone from the outside can see how dysfunctional it is, and you’re complicit” as a political appointee, the official continued. “It’s different for career people.”

“Two Justice Department officials said they’ve been passively resisting the president since 2017. After the op-ed was published, ‘we even went around fist-bumping each other,’ one official said.”

Inside the White House, staffers were apoplectic. Trump himself insisted the Times must “turn over” the writer for “National Security purposes,” if the writer and senior official does “indeed exist.” The op-ed contained not even a hint of classified information, providing no national-security justification for Trump’s tacit threat.

Behind the scenes, sources say, Trump wasn’t holding up much better. According to people familiar with his response, the president, in the words of one adviser, “exploded” to those close to him on Wednesday, demanding to know who this anonymous senior official could be.

At the Department of Justice—which has been eyed suspiciously by the White House for nearly two years as a source of insubordination—the atmosphere was tense Thursday morning. Two officials inside the department said they’ve been passively resisting the president since he took office in 2017. “We see ourselves as rebels,” one official said laughing, adding that the op-ed marked a perfect time to celebrate.

But a third, who feels similarly about Trump, sounded darker notes about where Trump’s ire over public embarrassment could lead.

“It could motivate Trump to pursue the Erdogan-style purge of the bureaucracy that he hasn’t pursued yet,” said a Justice Department trial attorney. “Some of the Trump-appointed U.S. attorneys are serious people committed to law enforcement. What if Trump were to replace them with loyalist hacks from the campaign, like Boris Epshteyn? We’d like to think that the Senate wouldn’t allow it, but we can’t be sure.”

The piece thrust much of Washington D.C. into a whodunit mystery, with rampant speculation about the authorship and outright shock from veterans of White Houses past that it happened at all.

Matt Bennett, a former Clinton aide, emailed, “Even during the impeachment, when all of us were horrified by his personal conduct, no one in the Clinton White House (or administration) would EVER have done anything like this … I can’t imagine this happening in any modern presidency other than Nixon’s.”

Reaction from the president’s boosters inside his ranged from fury to insistence that the official at issue is undoubtedly a middle manager with no real authority or insight.

“It’s important that we figure out who this person is and what their title and role was,” said Marc Lotter, a former senior Trump administration official, told The Daily Beast on Thursday. “My title was special assistant to the president and press secretary to the vice president, and I’m sure [a lot of people] thought I was senior staff, and yet there were still meetings and discussions that were way above my paygrade… Everybody in this city is a senior official to something if it gets them on television, or published, or a job somewhere else.”

“If there are senior people in leadership positions and these are their observations and feelings... They need to take steps that are more bold. Publicly resign, en masse.”

— State Department official

Though it is unclear if a full-on, formal investigation has been launched, West Wing officials who spoke to The Daily Beast say that aides—some out of professional anger, some to try to quell Trump’s rage, others out of pure curiosity—are scrambling to narrow down a shortlist of who the nameless scribe likely is. One senior Trump aide conceded that much of this has amounted to little more than a “guessing game,” as the term “senior administration official” is a tremendously broad classification that stretches across different areas of the federal government.

Outside of the administration, speculation quickly turned into amateur detective work that led to some specious conclusions. The column’s use of the word “lodestar” led a number of social media sleuths to finger Vice President Mike Pence, whose office has used the word in a number of official statements. By Thursday, Pence himself, along with a host of Trump cabinet secretaries and senior White House officials, had publicly denied writing it.

That hasn’t stopped bookies from getting in on the action. PredictIt, an online betting market, started taking wagers early Thursday morning on which senior administration official was behind the column.

Handling the fallout of politically-motivated anonymous quotes or leaks is a rite of passage for every president. Early in Barack Obama’s administration, a 66-page report on the future course of the Afghanistan war, penned by then-commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, was sent to Bob Woodward before the president had announced his formal decision. Later in his time in office, a White House official famously described Obama’s foreign policy as “leading from behind.”

““It was sort of a breach of the Obama ethos,” said one top aide from Obama’s comms shop. “But on the scale of everything we were dealing with it was a small deal.”

What Trump is confronting now is far different, veterans of past White House stressed. The leaks and anonymous quotes aren’t being offered to affect a political outcome or force the president’s hand one way or another. They’re warning signs about the president himself.

“Closest thing I can think of is Scott McClellan’s book, but Scott put his name on it. There’s nothing I can recall, but I was there for much of the first term, and the President was pretty popular,” said Ari Fleischer, press secretary for George W. Bush’s White House.

With the guessing game underway, some sources made sport out of it.

“If you’re asking me if I wrote the op-ed, yes, I did,” one U.S. intelligence official told The Daily Beast before chuckling extensively. The official did not write the op-ed.